That outcomes might be influenced by random factors is of no comfort to those of us labouring under the supposed illusion that outcomes can be influenced by deliberate wilful action. Randomness might make the future unpredictable, but it doesn’t help us to exercise free will.
This is a valid point - I honestly don’t know if you can draw a hard and fast line based on the size of a system and say, “Here is where quantum weirdness goes away.” Decoherence is still a continuing subject of research in physics. I recall reading (though I don’t remember where, maybe I’ll try to find it later) that one group of physicists had determined that even for a molecule as large as a buckyball (which are huge) all the weirdness is still there (it produced a diffraction pattern in a double slit experiment.) I know of professors here at Dartmouth who are doing work with nanocircuits that exhibit quantum properties.
So at what level does the brain decohere? Well, I sure as heckfire don’t know, and no one else does either.
So you’re okay with punishing folks for things they didn’t decide to do? Because, under the deterministic conception, that’s what we do. Every determinist I’ve seen who discusses the topic wants to overhaul the criminal justice system. If you don’t, I confess I don’t understand why you think the issue is important. Unless your hunt is theological free will, which I will say interests me none at all (that is, I’m an atheist, but on other grounds).
FWIW I’ve spoken with many a determinist in my day, and only one of them wanted to overhaul the criminal justice system. For the most part, determinists are concerned to articulate a way to justify something like present practice in light of (what they take to be) the fact of determinism.
I think DtC’s line is perfectly reasonable: Criminal Justice serves the purpose of maintaining stability and security, and causing harm to wrongdoers is a way this goal might reasonably be thought to be achievable, determinism or not.
-FrL-
I return to what has been my main thesis in these threads. Free will functionally exists as a necessary consequence of having a self. It is no more and no less real than “I” am.“I” as a self-aware entity requires functional free will to exist and free will cannot exist without a sense of self to experience it. It would be impossible for any consciously aware self to not appear to have free will. Together they create an organism that experiences qualia as a means to form adaptive responses. It’s existence is not threatened by whether or not the universe is, at another level of analysis, entirely deterministic, or not.
Why do you think a self-aware entity requires free will?
I think all of those things can happen in a deterministic universe with people with complex but deterministic brains (whether we have them or not, it seems perfectly reasonable). Why do you think it’s not a good model for those types of “output”?
Even if our universe is deterministic, the criminal justice system plays a key part of that system for 2 reasons:
Deterrence
Our deterministic brains calculate the negative consequences of certain actions and “choose” (“choose” here means processes all input including internal goals, experiences etc. and determines proper output) not to do those actions.
Protection
Our deterministic brains calculate the positive results of removing specific individuals from society, and we do it.
Pbear, one additional note on the criminal justice system: Even though I might personally entertain the idea of a deterministic universe, there is no way I’m going to advocate changing anything until it’s absolutely clear we really know what is going on, which appears to be a looooong way off.
the idea of having “a goal”, or even accounting for “experiences” is inherently non-deterministic. If the universe is deterministic in the way described by the OP NOTHING matters to us other than the originally determined path of each particle at the onset of the big bang, thus by acknowledging such thing as goals or the worth of experience, you’re assuming a different position than determinism. You are in fact assuming my earlier position, that each experience and personal goals are NEW information to the system that affects the outcome of the system, thus rendering it non-deterministic based on what information is added to the system at any given moment
Agreed; if we’re just following the script and are unable to deviate from it, then we’re just being tricked into thinking we have a ‘self’ and free will. In that case, we don’t, in fact, make decisions at all; they’re made for us and are an unavoidable consequence of unthinking chemical/physical processes.
But if this is the case - if we’re really only along for the ride, why is the illusion that we’re in some kind of control so complete and compelling?
RaftPeople,
I know that I’m repeating myself, but what the Hell … this time with extra words.
Self-awareness is a survival strategy. It emerges out of that very pardox that was referenced in the thought experiment, the Godel-Escher-Bach “strange loop” of a system that includes itself as a member of the set in infinite regress of reupdating in a group of similar dynamic systems that are also part of the set. The advantage of self-awareness is that it allows for higher level planning. It is as we experience making choices (experience functional free will) that we experience our senses of self and we cannot have that sense of self without deciding things … if nothing else what to think next. Selfness is the experience of agency as we integrate all the qualia and processing the various brain areas send upstream and the looping plans back down again in a nonlinear multiply nested infinite regress.
“Why?” Mangetout? Because free will is as real as as our selves are. We are not aware of all of the events that have led up to our actions. Heck, neurologic research has seen that often we don’t even have any conscious concept of why we are doing what we are doing but are making up conscious reasons after the fact. To will away our expereince of free will would be to will away our very selves. At the level of our selves we experience a world that is contigent upon our choices. We as individuals survive to no small extent according to how well we make those choices. This exactly as true whether we had some soul-based God-given Free Will or if all is ultimately a natural result of what followed before it with no Ghost in the machine.
Except that you’re saying we don’t actually make those choices. We can’t make those choices, because the whole concept of ‘choice’ is invalid.
That depends on your level of analysis.
Shakespeare as an individual existed. It is equally true to state that Shakespeare decided what words to write in what order as to say that a group of various chemical and electrical impulses reacted to all of which came before and produced an output.
On one level “we” don’t exist but are just the illusion of our selves that we expereince. But I prefer to think of it as that our sense of selves and its necessary corallory of our sense of free will and agency, are metaphysical emergent properties that really exist.
But in a deterministic universe, it couldn’t have been any different, so it’s unremarkable.
Making a declaration does not serve as an argument. I would say that the best we know right now is that we do not know whether the human brain inherently indeterminable unless you know of some evidence that I do not.
I find several arguments in this thread to be similar to the “god of the gaps” that is so popular with some religious groups. For them anything we can’t currently explain is blamed on GOD. In this thread whatever man can’t predict is assumed to be predictable by FUTURE TECHNOLOGY. I think this is very fuzzy thinking. It seams obvious that there are some systems, even at the macro level, whose future state is undetermined by their very nature, such as the human brain. To state that advanced technology would render the impossible possible is simply applying to magic.
The universe is governed by natural laws and every electron goes where it naturally would. The human brain is, in part, self-governed. That does not mean it violates that laws of nature. Simply that it has harnessed those laws for its own ends. Several times the human brain has been compared to weather patterns. The analogy only goes so far and will not address my points until you can show me a weather system that examines its own actions and decides to blow in a different direction. Or will the beat of a butterflies wing in the Amazon make you change your mind on this question?
The very possibility of us asking these questions seems to settle the point for me. Unless you want to stipulate that the big bang preordained philosophy.
Exactly! Thank you. I should have thought to put it in those terms myself. That’s it in a nut shell.
The second part of your statement is provably incorrect. We have deterministic programs that account for experience and factor that into future “decisions”.
The first part is also incorrect depending on the use of the word “goal”. To me, something as simple as internal feedback regarding the body’s need for food creates a “goal” of acquiring more food. It’s possible you are assuming a definition of “goal” that requires a non-deterministic element, but that is not what I assume.
Experience and personal goals certainly have a component from external (to the brain) source, but if the universe is deterministic, that doesn’t change anything. Those external (to the brain) inputs are part of the giant calculation.
If you are referring to a brain in isolation as the “system”, then of course, if we aren’t including all particles in the universe in the equation then the argument falls apart, but trivially so. Any subset of the universe taken by itself as a “system” will have unpredictable inputs because it means by definition we are ignoring all of the stuff around it that could interact with it.
Good so far.
Maybe the problem is the qualifier “functional”, I’m not sure what the term “functional free will” means.
If it’s a term that can be applied to deterministic systems, and really just describes the process of converting input to output, then great, we’re on the same page.
If, on the other hand it implies something non-deterministic, then I would say that you are making a proclamation without backing it up.
Again, assuming that “functional free will” really just means simple input/process/output, then I agree with all of this (except, “infinite”).
RaftPeople, I mean that we not only convert input to output, we do so by having the experience of free will, that such is inherent in having a sense of self. That sense of self and that sense of agency is what makes us different from other input/output devices. Now it could be interpreted that free will and sense of self are both illusions … or it could be argued that both are real emergent properties at that level of analysis … either way it is moot. It is necessary to have one in order to have the other. The question of whether it exists becomes trivial.
Pábitel, while I actually do believe that the universe is such that some information is not just unknown but is unknowable, you are right that my working presumption is that information is knowable until proven otherwise. To asume that information is unknowable until you have proven it is knowable by knowing it is unteneble to me. That the human brain is by its nature “obviously” indeterminable is not only not obvious, it goes against the huge advance made in understanding brain function that have been made so far. No, that understanding does not amount to a complete picture of brain function. But the progress and been quite dramatic. The brain is made up of stuff that interacts. “Guilty!” I plead, to the charge that I believe we can, with further study, understand how things made of stuff that interacts work. Be that the brain, the pancreas, the sun, or the insides of atoms.
Of course the point here is whether or not the human brain actually “examines its own actions and decides to blow in a different direction” any more than the weather does. And I am trying to argue both sides of that question with the distinction being made that it depends at what level you are viewing from. To be sure, the human brain is different than the weather in that it possesses a sense of self and is organized insuch a way as to include itself among the set of those things that it process about … a “strange loop” indeed to quote Hofstadter. But such an organizational flow does not make it any less of a deterministic system.